Key Highlights

• Anthropic posted Q2 2026 revenue of more than $11.5 billion, up roughly 14-fold from the same period last year.
• The company reached its first quarterly operating profit, estimated at $559 million.
• Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate crossed $47 billion in May, ahead of OpenAI's $40 billion.
• The company is projecting $190 to $200 billion in revenue by 2028.
• Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan are working on what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record.

Anthropic posted preliminary second-quarter revenue of more than $11.5 billion, a roughly 14-fold jump from the $787 million it reported in the same quarter a year ago. The figure also more than doubles the $4.73 billion the company recorded in Q1 2026. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers including CEO Dario Amodei, is best known for its Claude family of AI models and counts Amazon and Google among its major backers.

🚨HUGE: Anthropic investors expect the Claude maker to seek a valuation of at least $2 trillion in an IPO as early as October, per FT. The bullish case is driven by annualized revenue projected to reach $100 billion to $120 billion by year-end, though Anthropic has not set an… pic.twitter.com/KNLkkw811X

— Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) August 14, 2026

The Claude maker also reported positive adjusted operating income for the quarter, marking its first quarterly operating profit, estimated at $559 million. That is a notable milestone in an industry where the largest AI developers have reported heavy losses as they spend on computing capacity. The figures are still preliminary and could be revised.

The company's annualized revenue run rate crossed $47 billion in May 2026. A run rate annualizes revenue from a recent period — quarterly sales multiplied by four, for example — and is a common shorthand for momentum at fast-growing private companies, though it assumes the latest pace holds. That compares to OpenAI's run rate of over $40 billion, though the two figures may not be calculated using the same method.

A Company Moving Fast

Anthropic's revenue run rate was around $9 billion at the end of 2025, and the company has grown more than 10-fold annually in each of the three years through early 2026. That pace of growth is a key reason investors are willing to look as far ahead as 2028 when valuing the company.

Anthropic is projecting revenue of $190 to $200 billion by 2028. That figure dwarfs current metrics and reflects the scale of growth investors are being asked to bet on.

Bankers are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on those 2028 projections, an approach that is less common but has precedent. Cerebras Systems used 2028 revenue figures ahead of its IPO, and SpaceX projections extended to 2029 before it went public.

Cloudflare, Palantir, and SpaceX are being used as comparison points for Anthropic's valuation. Palantir trades at 53 times expected 2026 revenue, while SpaceX and Cloudflare both trade at around 41.6 times.

The IPO Road Ahead

Anthropic has confidentially filed for a public listing, and Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase are working on the deal. Confidential submissions allow issuers to work through regulators' questions before details become public, a route the SEC has permitted for all issuers since 2017. The company is meeting with prospective investors ahead of what could be one of the largest IPOs on record. The eventual prospectus would also give outside investors their first audited look at Anthropic's revenue mix, customer concentration, and computing costs.

A fall debut would put Anthropic on the market before rivals OpenAI and DeepSeek, the Chinese AI firm also preparing to go public.

IPO listings this year have already raised $256.4 billion, the most in a single year since 2021, according to Bloomberg data.

Investors are betting that as the company scales, revenue will grow faster than costs, allowing margins to expand over time. Current spending on GPUs, model training, and hiring is heavy, but analysts expect those costs to shrink as a share of revenue.

One investor, David Merkel of Aleph Investments, said a $2 trillion valuation is possible but raised questions about whether it would hold over time.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment on the IPO valuation details.